AT SOME POINT BETWEEN THE TIME WHEN NICHOLAS HAD LEFT to…to do whatever it was that required him to be shirtless…and her finding the Buddha statue’s decapitated head, a suspicion had begun to take root in the back of her mind. And as she’d walked, glimpsing the dark peaks of the temple in the distance, she’d had a single moment of relief at having been right before the anger began to pump through her again.
New York.
London.
And now, Cambodia.
It was too much to be a coincidence. She’d taken out the letter, rereading the first clue they’d been able to ignore, as it came before the passage in New York: Rise and enter the lair, where the darkness gives you your stripes. It must mean the Taktsang Palphug Monastery in Bhutan, called the Tiger’s Lair or the Tiger’s Nest, where her mother claimed to have gone into one of the caves to meditate on what to do with her life. Which now seemed, in a word, unlikely.
Her mother had told her how to decipher the letter. She’d told her any number of times, under the guise of bedtime stories, about her life and adventures—she’d even painted the scenes, hanging them on the wall of the living room in the correct order, which made Etta feel like an idiot for not making the connection right away. Each clue had been carefully disguised to hide the reality of her life as a traveler; each was hiding in plain sight.
Now Etta was sure that the painting of the British Museum hadn’t been meant to lead her to the museum, but to the painting’s other subject: Alice. And Etta was willing to bet that, if she double-checked, she’d find that her mother’s supposed first apartment in the city, the one she’d painted to show a glimpse of the lights of Midtown East through one of the windows, was in the same location as the Dove Tavern.
Are you listening, Etta?
Etta, are you paying attention?
Let me tell you a story.…
Rose had planted the seeds, watered them again and again by repeating the stories over the years. She had given Etta what she needed to find the astrolabe; Etta only had to make the connection.
Etta had never been to the Tiger’s Nest, let alone Bhutan, but she knew someone beside her mother who had.
She and Nicholas walked side by side, her eyes trained on the ground, his on the path in front of them, until more of the dark stones and statues rose out of the foliage and marked their path forward. From her mother’s apparently half-true stories, Etta knew that both cities—Angkor Wat, and their present location, Angkor Thom—had, in her time, been largely cleared of the jungle’s ever-reaching overgrowth to allow for tourists to explore the spread of temples and structures. But whatever year or era they were in, it was clear it was after it had been abandoned by the Khmer Empire, but before it had come to the attention of Western civilization.
“We’ll need to swim,” Nicholas said, the first words he’d uttered in nearly an hour. They’d come upon what Etta thought might have been part of the moat that surrounded the remains of the grand city. The moat had naturally filled up with earth and wildlife over the years, but with the rain lashing down around them, the water level was high enough that they couldn’t wade their way across.
“No, my mom talked about some kind of a bridge…at the southern gate, I think,” Etta said. She doubted it looked anything like the modern causeway that existed in her era, but it was worth finding, to avoid whatever was living in the moat.
To fill the silence and stop thinking about the way the rain made the trees rattle like angry snakes, Etta asked, “Where did you travel with Julian?”
“Here and there.”
All right. Julian was still off-limits, and she wouldn’t press him, not when it was clearly still painful. But Etta was incredibly curious about that sliver of time in his life.
“I think you were close to getting on the right trail to the astrolabe,” she told him. “I’m not sure if you were in the right year, but I’m almost positive the first clue refers to the Tiger’s Nest. And that’s where Julian died, right?”
Nicholas ran a hand back over his short hair and nodded.
Etta’s fingers twisted around one another. “It’s my mom’s fault, isn’t it? Everything. You traveling with him, his death…”
“I can forgive your mother for doing what she believed to be right, even if her methods were questionable and a damned pain,” he said, “but if we trace the blame back to its roots, there’s only Ironwood at fault.”
Always Ironwood.
“I’m not sure where or how to begin,” he said, holding a branch out of her way. Nicholas searched for the words. “Julian and I were sent to Bhutan because the old man had found records that a monk once sighted a young blond woman in one of the meditation caves—one who never emerged from it again. We thought for certain it would be another fruitless trip. Over the years, the search took us everywhere from Mexico to India, to what I think you’d know as Alaska…?”